Host Interfacing and Connection Management in the DTM Gigabit Network

The thesis is logically divided in two parts; one part discusses host interfacing to high-speed networks and the other focuses on connection establishment and resource reservation in DTM gigabit networks. An important problem posed by high-speed networks available today is the inability to provide the high bandwidth of the transmission media to an application. This thesis discusses how to avoid the interface bottleneck between the network and the host. Many design choices presented are also applicable when designing other network units, such as switches and routers. The thesis presents a design for a high-speed host interface to a SUN workstation that is being built for the DTM network prototype. DTM is a new protocol suite designed for high-speed networks running at several gigabits per second. It is based on fast circuit switching and uses 64-bit slots to transfer data. The DTM protocol suite and a 622 Mb/s prototype of a DTM network that is running at the department of Teleinformatics, KTH is presented in the thesis. In a fast circuit-switched network such as DTM, the connection establishment and resource reservation strategy is crucial to the performance of the network. Also, these mechanisms are tightly coupled to the host interface. The thesis will therefore focus on connection establishment and resource reservation in DTM and give a description of a scheme for fast connection establishment.